new publication: Jacques Ellul and educational technology

I’ve repeatedly referenced 20th century French technology scholar Jacques Ellul on my blog(s) since the beginning of the year. While my interest in Ellul’s work is also personal and political, I wrote back in February that one of the main reasons I’m reading a lot of Ellul right now is to add a stronger theoretical foundation to my scholarly work.

With that context in mind, I’m happy to share that my first Ellul-inspired article has just been published in the Journal of Computing and Higher Education! After I wrote this post on what Ellul had to say about the value of research, Stephanie Moore was kind enough to invite me to expand my thoughts there into a contribution for a special issue of that journal that she was putting together on “The Research We Need” in educational technology.

Turning an off-the-cuff into a medium-length journal article in a relatively short period of time was a bit of a challenge, but it was a great way to spend my end of semester, and I really appreciated the chance to pretty much immediately apply my exploration of his writing. I have found Ellul tremendously helpful for framing and voicing implicit concerns that I’ve had about research, research infrastructure, and the field of educational technology for a long time—and I think that’s what theory is good for, so this feels like a victory to me.

Anyway, there’s a read only version of the article freely available here, and here’s the abstract as a preview:

Jacques Ellul, a 20th century French academic, is best known for his writing on technique, understood as both individual means to ends and an all-encompassing system that prioritizes efficient solutions to problems. While Ellul’s terminology is not necessarily familiar in contemporary educational technology research, it represents traditional understandings of individual tools as a subset of instructional systems and captures the field’s emphasis on finding more efficient and efficacious means of teaching and learning. However, Ellul’s writing on technique is largely skeptical, creating an opportunity for educational technology researchers to turn a more critical eye towards our emphasis on solutions to problems. This essay argues that while an increased emphasis on problems over things is welcome, Ellul’s writing invites more careful consideration of what it means to solve problems. In particular, I draw on Ellul to ask three provocative questions: which problems should we solve, who should solve those problems, and is solving problems always good?

I’ve spotted a handful of typos in the manuscript that I am embarrassed to not have caught while reviewing it this past weekend (though in at least one case, I’m going to blame the manuscript proofing software, which was a real pain to work with), but despite that egg on my face, I feel pretty happy with the article. I’m also looking forward to applying Ellul’s thinking to other areas in my research.

• publications
• research
• edtech
• Jacques Ellul
• Stephanie Moore
• Jill Stefaniak
• Tom Reeves